Overview

In a makeshift laboratory built on a golf course in Maryland, chemist Stanley Lovell led a secret team of scientists that developed the secret gadgets and weapons of the Second World War. Their 'Dirty Tricks Department' was the real-life equivalent of James Bond's legendary Q Branch. If a spy or saboteur needed a forged passport for cover, a silent pistol for executions, an incendiary device for starting fires, or a cyanide pill to kill themselves with before being captured alive, the scientists created it. Moreover, they developed poisons to assassinate foreign leaders, chemical and biological weapons to deploy against enemy soldiers, and truth drugs to interrogate prisoners of war. The Dirty Tricks Department is the first book to focus on the daring, exciting, and often tragic exploits of the men and women who made and used these devices. Lovell and his team exerted a disproportionally large influence on history. Not only were they integral to the Allied victory, but they left a dark legacy that has, until now, gone mainly unacknowledged. AUTHOR: John Lisle is a history professor at Louisiana Tech University where he teaches courses on secret warfare. His writing on the D Branch, the intelligence community, and the history of science has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, Military History (forthcoming), Skeptic, The Journal of Intelligence History, and Physics in Perspective. 20 b/w illustrations

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9781803992648

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The Dirty Tricks Department is a fascinating tale vividly told, full of sabotage and skulduggery, deviousness and invention, and populated by a cast of remarkable characters. James Bond meets Sherlock Holmes - but in deadly serious real life. -- H.W. Brands * <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalists <i>Traitor to His Class</i> and <i>The First American</i> *

Author Information

John Lisle is a history professor at Louisiana Tech University where he teaches courses on secret warfare. His writing on the D Branch, the intelligence community, and the history of science has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, Military History (forthcoming), Skeptic, The Journal of Intelligence History, and Physics in Perspective.

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